On Wednesday 23 Jan 2008 7:14 am, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh wrote: > most of europe is christian, a higher proportion than india is hindu, > and has fewer linguistic divisions than india (including only 3 written > scripts) - but there are 30+ countries (yes, despite the "ever closer" > Union).
I see this (perfectly true) statement as a summary of some really deep and complex historic and social and cultural dynamics. Most of Europe being Christian is the result of both Christianity (and Islam) being practised as "Only me and nobody else" religions. (On a another note - I am note I am not at all sure that the Christianity I learned in school in India is the same adversarial Roman Christianity that overran Europe.) When Islam plundered through vast areas of Europe, Christianity bounced back and virtually eliminated Islam, just as Islam had eliminated all other faiths in most of the lands that it overran. But Christianity in Europe split into various factions that fought and fought and fought and fought until Europe became tired and eventually came up with the treaty of Westphalia. That helped create "secularism" which means absence of religion, but in practice it means separation of Church from state, with the government (state) being secular. But even a "common religion" (of many factions) did not stop internecine European conflict. Europe battered itself out of world domination and handed the baton to the US. India, with less commonality of religion and more linguistic variety is seen as fissionable based on a Euro-centric view of what lack of common religion or common language should normally do to a land area based on the European experience. Valid as this argument may sound, this makes no effort whatsoever to check if there could possibly be other shared traits that have not been picked up by an essentially Euro-centric view of society, religion and nations. The fact is that such a commonality was repeatedly recognised and picked up and utilized by Shankaracharya, Viveknanda, Mahatma Gandhi and Aurobindo among others. But these names mean little or nothing from the viewpoint of the school education that Indian children get. Hence Indians go through life imagining that there is nothing unifying in India. shiv
